In 2023, DEA agents in Albuquerque pulled over a vehicle tied to a fentanyl investigation. A child was sitting in the back.
Underneath the child's seat, in a hidden compartment, they found between 6,000 and 7,000 fentanyl pills and a gun.
"We took his drugs. We took his gun. It was in a little compartment underneath the seat that the child was sitting on," Special Agent David Howell told CBS News this week. "We thought the U.S. Attorney's Office would be pleased. Instead, they brought us into their office and chastised us."
The agents got in trouble for taking the drugs.
Howell, a 20-year DEA veteran, says the scolding came from the federal prosecutors who wanted the fentanyl to keep moving. They were willing to let those pills go to a house with a kid in it.
In his first TV interview, Howell described what he calls a years-long practice inside the DEA: letting huge fentanyl shipments "walk." Agents watched the drugs move so they could trace the supply chain and build bigger cases, instead of seizing them.
"For three years, I've told my DEA managers that we're allowing dangerous amounts of fentanyl to hit the street, and we're doing nothing to stop it, and they didn't listen to me," he said.
The worst of it ran from 2023 to 2025, during the Biden administration. Police have used "controlled deliveries" for decades to follow drugs up the chain. Fentanyl was supposed to be the exception. "We at the DEA have let drugs hit the street, yes," Howell said. "The difference was we were told not to with fentanyl."
That rule exists for a reason. Two milligrams of fentanyl can kill. According to Howell, the DEA let millions of pills through.
The rules changed on Biden's watch. In 2017, President Trump's first Justice Department required agents to seize fentanyl "as soon as practicable." In June 2024, Biden's Justice Department rewrote them to give agents and prosecutors more "discretion."
The federal prosecutor running New Mexico's cases, Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney Alex Uballez, defended the approach: "The bigger fish are worth catching, and that will save more lives."
One big catch did come eventually. In 2024, agents on a wiretap case learned of 350,000 fentanyl pills and let them go. That case later led to the largest fentanyl seizure in DEA history, announced in 2025 by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The 350,000 pills that walked first didn't come back.
New Mexico's Democratic attorney general, Raúl Torrez, has sued the federal government over the practice. "There's no escaping the conclusion that New Mexico moving in the wrong direction seems to be directly connected to this practice of walking fentanyl in this community," he said. Bernalillo County, home to Albuquerque, declared a state of emergency this month over surging fentanyl overdoses.
Howell paid a price for speaking up. He was shipped to El Paso, pulled off cases, given worse reviews and denied surveillance equipment.
"Our city is being destroyed by this drug," he said. "That's why we're sitting here, and that's what I'm here to tell the people."
The cleanup came after Biden left. Terry Cole, the Trump appointee who took over the DEA in July 2025, asked the Justice Department's Inspector General, Don Berthiaume, to investigate as soon as Howell's complaint came out. "When this whistleblower came forward, DEA Administrator Cole immediately requested an independent investigation by DOJ IG," a Justice Department spokesperson said. That review is ongoing, and the House Oversight Committee is also looking into it.
For years, Biden officials told Americans the border was secure while fentanyl poured into the country. Now a DEA agent says the agency's own policy let millions of pills reach American streets, because prosecutors decided a bigger case was worth more than 7,000 pills sitting under a child.
Howell said it in five words: the DEA "poisoned our community to make cases."